This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf.  Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all of my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist.  This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.  I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf.  The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie.  And it is where you want to be on a golf course.

You may remember that I just opened this department a few days ago, one of three I run as director.

The others are the Department of Pet Peeves and the Department of “Just Saying.”

This department is open again because there is so much material conveyed by good writers.  Even if I don’t always agree with what’s written, the good words prompt me to engage in thoughtful consideration.

And, by the way, that phrase – “thoughtful consideration” – should be an ongoing part of politics.  And I say that as a former lobbyist and a current political junkie.  Unfortunately, thoughtful consideration is almost absent from political discourse these days.

What follows are the reasons I opened the Department of Good Quotes Worth Remembering again.

FROM BYRON YORK IN THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER:  There is a wrenching debate going on inside the Republican Party over the simplest of questions:  Should the party look backward or forward?

GOP politicians who want to move on face a lot of resistance from two very different quarters.  First, the Democrat Party very much wants to keep talking about 2020.   After all, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi created the January 6 committee in part to keep the idea of a Trump-Republican “insurrection” alive into the 2022 mid-term elections.  [I would add that the “idea” of the January 6 insurrection is not just that, an idea; it is a reality.]  

And then there is Trump, who in recent days has been using his press releases—the equivalent of his old tweets—to dwell on various 2020 issues.

COMMENT:  I don’t care if Republicans look backward or forward.  But I believe what they should do is keep in mind they are part of representative government that should work for the people.  The same should be said of Democrats.

FROM THE WASHINGTON POST ON ITS EDITORIAL PAGE:  Former president Donald Trump liked the feel of tearing things up — figuratively, as he did with laws and norms of public service; but also literally, as he did with documents that he was required to preserve under the Presidential Records Act.

Having refused to give his elected successor a smooth and orderly transition, Trump then skulked away to Mar-a-Lago in Florida with 15 boxes of official documents and mementos that should have gone to the National Archives.

The Post reported this past weekend that Trump routinely destroyed briefing papers, schedules, articles, letters and memos, ripping them into quarters or smaller pieces, leaving the detritus on his desk in the Oval Office, in the trash can of his private West Wing study or on the floor of Air Force One.

Trump’s aides were left to retrieve the pieces and try to piece them back together, sometimes hunting through special “burn bags” intended for classified material to find torn documents that needed to be reassembled and preserved.

Recently, the committee investigating the January 6 insurrection received documents from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) that appeared to have been torn apart and taped back together.

Trump broke the law. After President Richard Nixon’s resignation, Congress passed a number of laws intended to preserve the integrity of documents and other materials from Nixon’s presidency, and made the laws applicable to all future presidents.

The Presidential Records Act of 1978 ended the practice of records belonging to former presidents and declared that the United States shall “reserve and retain complete ownership, possession, and control of presidential records.”  The law requires a president to “take all such steps as may be necessary” to make sure the records are preserved — an important pillar of accountability in a democracy and also essential for historical understanding of the presidency.

COMMENT:  There even was a story in the Port indicating that Trump tried to flush torn papers down the toilet.  The basic question:  What was he is trying to hide?  And why he is still trying to hide?

FROM THE NEW WORK TIMES ON EDITING ISSUES THAT PROMPTED A LEBEL SUIT:  Former Times Editor James Bennet said he had “a million other things going on” when a fellow editor stopped by his office at the New York Times to tell him about weaknesses in a draft of an editorial the newspaper was rushing to publish on a June evening in 2017.

Then the chief of the paper’s editorial page, Bennet read the piece and agreed it wasn’t quite working.  But while he generally preferred to let his writers revise their work, Bennet told a jury he was concerned about the paper’s looming deadline for the night — and so took it upon himself to re-write it.

In the course of rapidly re-working the piece, Bennet inserted an inaccurate sentence — notable for his use of the word “incitement” — that led to the Times getting sued for defamation by former Alaska governor Sarah Palin. On Day 5 of the blockbuster trial in Manhattan’s U.S. District Court, Bennet spent hours on the stand describing his on-the-job failures that the newspaper’s lawyers tried to present as stemming from honest mistakes — and not the “actual malice” Palin must prove to show she has been libeled.

COMMENT:  On a far lesser scale, during my time as a journalist many years ago, I saw the risks when an editor chose to be a “re-writer,” not an “editor.”  Frankly, in this New York Times case, I have little sympathy for Sarah Palin, but, at the same time, the Times deserves to be called into question for its management of the opinion pages, even if it ends up not being the case that it practiced “actual malice,” the long-supported test for libel cases.

FROM WASHINGTON POST COLUMNIST GEORGE WILL:  Here is a great sentence from his most recent work. 

“Remember the jest:  Progressives do not care what people do as long as it is mandatory.”

COMMENT:  I’ll let George Will have the last word today.